Broken Ghost

by Niall Griffiths

  He calls himself Rang because he has red hair so at school they called him orangutang and it stuck and he’s from Carmarthen and he’s staying in a caravan on the site just outside town for a few days and it is in there that he fucks her and is startled and delighted by the ferocity of her hunger. No sooner has he withdrawn than she’s sucking on him and this she does three times and his third orgasm is painful, something seeming to snap in his belly and force out a thin blip of grey semen. They sit outside on the caravan’s step in the still night-time and smoke a spliff and they hear a heated vixen yelping in the darkness and the woman says something about it sounding like a prayer but she’s wrecked and talking gibberish and Rang has already decided that she’s fucking nuts anyway; out of her mind. Back in the caravan he tries to penetrate her arsehole but she won’t let him on the grounds that she’s still sore down there so he goes in vaginally again and cannot come despite the images he calls up and the friction becomes raw, raspy and she goes dry and then it becomes abrasive so he pulls out and she swoops down to suck him again but he’s having none of it and then there is some sort of sleep from which he thinks he is half-aroused by the sound of sobbing, twice, and some whispered words. This woman is a brilliant shag but she’s off her fucking head. He’ll have to kick her out early doors because he’s got to put some practice in for the darts tournament in Aberystwyth. Get her number first, tho; anyone who fucks like her needs to be kept in touch with. But when he wakes up properly, with the alarm, he’s alone in the caravan and the smells of salty rot and gasses from burst bladderwrack have not wholly crept up from the sea.

  Emma’s at the bus stop when the man awakes. Her face all colours from the make-up smears and her hair an abandoned nest. The memory of the woman-shape that blazed in her dreams is fonder, and clearer, to her than the man’s hands and physicality, his insisting-within, which things and the fleeting peace that follows – all fading already. As they always do. And, too, he had one of those pointy, nosy little penises and the brief sanctuary of it all is almost gone even before daylight has returned to the planet’s flank. The need is creeping, even before the goo has dried properly to scale on the pink and ringing parts of her and she knows that what was promised was done so falsely. So soon, the disappointment, and so soon too in each increasing twitch and mutter does the manic jabber of her body re-begin. If only she’d never gone up that fucking mountain. She wonders if Tomos is still sleeping or whether he’s woken fretting for his mother as she waits for the bus that will take her further away from him and closer to what was nothing more than the rising sun and the breeze in the reeds.

  MESSAGES

  @Madonna kicking off #llynsyfydrin#paradisebuiltinhell#floatingwoman

  @Madonna#llynsyfydrin I’m going. Coachloads of us. Anyone wanna join? RT#paradisebuiltinhell#BVM

  @ListentoDawkins you are all stupid children #growup#enlightenment#21stcentury’#getalife@enlightened@BraveBritain

  @Repent#ListentoDawkins the end is not nigh is already here #rapture#Megiddo#endtimes’#Repent

  @enlightened primitive fuckin Taffs rotfl #growup#getalife FFS

  @ListentoDawkins too true @BraveBritain ha yes we are leaving suck it up losers

  From Pobl Annwyl, bilingual blogspot, Emyr Gwenallt Roberts, AKA Llewellyn Nesa, version Saesneg

  Listen, now, pobl. She has spoken. She has chosen one of us. Drop your machines, turn away from drugs and pornography, forget your bank balance and pay attention. The scales have been lifted from your eyes. Dig and bridge and wild, she said; these were Her words. You have lived your lives in ignorance until now. Here is the power. Everything else is dust. This is the final warning and if you do not listen this time then expect rains of fire. Four horsemen. Repent and do it quickly. Turn away from your toys. Article 50? Mere dust. Put it all aside. Children no longer. Must I translate?

  Dig = work.

  Bridge = this is an INSTRUCTION, people. Make connections. Do not burn.

  Wild = well, okay, I confess to being stumped. But I know how to google and I know how to read and I know how to listen. Watch this space, pobl. And LISTEN. And LEARN. And REPENT. Now is the time. Must I repeat myself? Must SHE?

  TAGS: llewllyn nesa, chosen, listen, dig, bridge, wild, rejoice, repent, tsunami, She

  @Enlightened ha ha ha! LMFAO! Learn? You need to snowflake #Madonnabollocks#BVM shite have faith in Britain

  @ListentoDawkins cdnt agree more read some books taff. Time to grow up #Madonnabollocks#BVMshite

  @ownperson a pox on both yr houses you shd all just shut up who even cares lol #getajob#getalife

  @paradisebuiltinhell worried? We shd be. All shd be. You think this will be tolerated? Check it out youtube.com/watch?v=mA9&Bp93uyz

  @ownperson cdnt put it better myself #talksense #discipline#growingeconomy#takebackcontrol

  @FreeThinker #ownperson totally agree dont these people have jobs? #discipline#lazy#scroungers

  @FreeThinker men in skirts up there! Trannies! Seen it online! #debauchery

  @TrustinBritain repetitive beat law not still on statutes? Prob abolished by EU #takebackcontrol

  @ownperson @TrustinBritain yes clause 44 where is it? And bet will be illegals up there #takebackcontrol #ourownlaws

  @FreeThinker burning effigies now of Trump and Farage disgusting #discipline

  YouTube: http/:watch?v=mA9&Bp93uyz

  Government spokesman on the Llyn Syfydrin ‘commune’

  uploaded 30 mins ago

  Well of course we as a government like to see the great British people coming together in this way for purposes of, of celebration and the like if indeed that is what this is. I gather that there’s been some kind of, of apparition of some sort. But the reasons behind this, this commune as you call it, ah, they’re not really important to us, ah, not really important. What is important, what we should all be rather concerned about, is the, the litter, the mess that is being made of one of the most beautiful parts of our country. We’re looking at the question, the issue of trespass but the more immediate concerns, is the, ah, what one might call the lack of sanitation – the question of sewage disposal and the like and any possible health problems that might arise. There are young people up there, children, and their health and safety is a valid concern, paramount, as is the welfare of our wildlife. We believe that the beautiful British countryside should be open to and enjoyed by the great British public within the bounds of the law of course and I’m afraid to say that we’ve been getting reports of, well, to be frank, offensive smells. As I say there is no system of sanitation in place up there and with so many people in the one place, there is the question of waste where so many people gather in the one place. So yes we’re looking into it. There are further issues too, of, of police resources and the like; the local police do not have experience in, with, such mobs so we will have to draft in operatives from elsewhere, most likely the Met, which will incur further burden on the public purse and the hard-working British taxpayer. And, and, at this historic time, this moment in our nation as we exit the EU and, and we take this bold and brave step, then it is right that every citizen of Great Britain pulls together to make a success of this venture. We will be taking back control and each and every one of us will have a responsibility. The Great British public have given us a clear mandate and we will make a success of this new moment in our history if everyone gets behind it. Plus there have been rumours, we have credible information that illegal immigrants may be using this, this commune to, to, to hide in and in that way avoid the law and take advantage of our generosity. This will be looked into, as will the matter of lost work hours and the like but our first priority is for the health and safety of the people up there, in particular the children. Thank you.

  COMMENTS 10

  OwnPerson happy to live in there own shit these ppl. Dignity? Go and live on a mountian top while the rest of us have to work for a living. Vision of the virgin mary? Don’t make me laugh!!! just an excuse for a party methinks. Bring them all back down forcibly if necesar
y

  15 mins ago

  FreeThinker why are they allowed to do this? Not there mountain is it! What if ppl want to go up there for a nice walk or something! Bloody hippies spoiling it! Don’t they have jobs! Are they allowed all this time off work! Selfish you ask me! Pat yourself on the back Katie H you tell it like it is #KatieH for PM! I’d vote! Burning effigies! Remoaners guilty of treason!

  15 mins ago

  Jimbob i love going up mountains and now therl be hippy shit up their selfish bastards get them off your right andrew the foreman

  18 mins ago

  Rita who do they think they are? Think they own the bloody place. What about the children they cant live in that filth. Spoiling our lovely British countryside like this. Its for everyone not just them

  20 mins ago

  SimonLillico just an excuse if you ask me. Social networking has arranged this and they’ve been rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of a few days off work. Just lazy. Bet most of them are dole scroungers anyway or illegals like he said. We’ll get rid of them all when we’ve taken back control again and then we can put them all to work clearing up the mess they’ve made and when they’ve done that they can come and sweep my road too

  23 mins ago

  Bob C dirty cunts

  24 mins ago

  Rita it’s the kiddies I worry about should they not be in school

  25 mins ago

  AndrewtheForeman anyone else think those people don’t belomg up there? Not just the foreners I mean its not their mountain is it? Doesn’t someone own it?

  28 mins ago

  KatieH another excuse to slack off. If they put as much thought into working as they do into avoiding it the country wouldn’t be in this mess. After seeing this, any Remainiac should surely be done for treason. Unpatriotic!

  29 mins ago

  KatieH seethe

  30 mins ago

  THIN AND GREY

  In the top left corners of the screens are the figures AR100B, and next to them a date. The images below them are of a silver lake around which people-shapes press with faces whitened by the IR thermal imaging; later, when night rises, these faces will glow and froth on the grey screens as if internally lit, as if bags of white phosphorus have replaced the heads, as if they might be terrifying to look upon. The images are resolute, defined, if thin and grey; and beyond the lake and its tight and chalky huddle, on the roads and tracks that cross the mountain from the flat-lands around, more shapes of cars and vans move and converge and there are more of those burning figures on foot and all traffic is upwards-aimed. Here, in this bunker of screens and watching men, hands tap at keyboards and the images on the screens change. Zoom, and the white-faced shapes appear to be dancing; zoom, and around the froth of fires the shapes sit. With added magnification the screens might reveal the smaller glows and shapes in the trees, in the bracken, beneath branches and on branches: owl-shaped, with that radar face, mustelid-skulky, others with wings that spread and cloak. Later in the rise of night and when the thermal imaging becomes honed these smaller forms will show up on the screens; bumps and pulses of life, the light of such stuff, the various sheenings of breath and blood drawn to that high place and aglow, here, in this hidden room where all light is artificial and every colour is bleached and the faces that study the screens are coloured no shade at all.

  LICHEN

  Cen y cerig – skin of the rock. Or cen y coed – of the wood. The old language. Indicators of great antiquity, splotched harlequin libraries of data that bloom in places of pollution, in old mining scars and on the banks of mineralised rivers. Hungry for rock. Ersatz fur for a child’s hand to stroke. Earth-tongues, whitecaps, fairy gills – these names given by the great non-symbiont, the great ransacker of the most complex of webs, he who can name the moths elephant hawk and hummingbird hawk and death’s head hawk and also acidulate the air to scorch and ruin the gorgeous wing.

  Moon-blue and verdigris; the growth’s colours enlarged in the changing moods of the lake, olive at the shallower edges and tinged umber by the peat through which the waters have bled. In the rushes, neon damselflies thrum and zip; even the dung flies belong and are needed and in the bulge of their eyes is an inkling of infinity. Bolted foxgloves scope above the ryegrass like the necks of alert ostriches and offer themselves to the long tongues of the brimstones. Beetle-shucks snare the sun in the fans of cobwebs and seem, for a moment, to shine with a life long slurped away by the jewels that hang in the silver strings. Square celandine leaves scoop at the sunbeams and gather colours for the petals and there are mushrooms, too, brindled like the breasts of owls. In a moorhen’s nest in the reeds eggs twitch and crack and that noise alerts the shore-rats and sets them to skulk hungry and also the magpies and rooks which drop down out of the blue and amongst all this the people have gathered, circling fire pits which vibrate the air and there is music from the hunched figure on the decks and the amps mounted on the bed of a van and there are the smells of food and some people are in the water to bathe or play, mostly play, as they do on the shores and on the rising ground; a clan-gathering, groups on logs and on stones around fires in some of which the framework of effigies bends and burns and the air wobbles with the flames’ heat and up here everything blooms. Epochal upheavals in each crack of rock. Everything has caught some kind of fire. There is a new quality of seeing – the future hangs up here as well as the past and everything converses with everything else and even the dung flies, especially the dung flies, minute beads of shite on their finest hairs, belong. In the conifers, at the latrine trench, three people squat at intervals dictated by decency and then kick humus across their leavings and, given time, a cascade could happen here, at this place of waste, a trophic cascade as the apex eaters would appear behind the scavengers and so behaviour would, given time, lead even to the healing of the scabs on the moth’s wings. Given time enough, what unexpected chains of remedy could occur. The stinking midden brings the rats which bring the stoats and the weasels and the foxes and the badgers and the hawks and each of these brings others, always others. If given time. Light in the small and hooded eyes.

  And through and just above the moving heads the martens rocket. At the cooking pits other small birds gather; larger birds, too, the corvids, some gulls. Sparrows writhe in dust baths. Woodpeckers tattoo the trees. A child throws a ball for a dog to chase and the dog galumphs after it into the lake. Above, and unnoticed, a strange flier hovers, its one eye trained below. A fat, mechanical arachnid, small propellors at each corner, a camera hanging like a haemorrhoid. Symbols on one arm: AR100B. Emitting a slight whine – its brushless and gearless motors, a whine becoming a low drone. A low, whining, never-ceasing drone. It sees a lot, this flying thing, its eye never needing to blink or tear; it takes and transmits and that’s all it does, turns all the faces below it one whiteness and all the colours around, the thousand greens, a single shade of tarmac-grey. A goshawk soars above it, assessing in the ancient folds and pathways of its brain and alien-ness, not size, is the thing’s repellent. The raptor blinks before it catches its own shadow in its claws, wrecker of the lesser fetch, banks again and swoop-glides away down the valley side across which the shadow of a cloud is cast like a sudden wave of ink. The machine also banks, drops then rises again, slides to a site above the ridge on which several people have gathered to peck with their fingers at phones and it hovers there, pinned against the blue, safe from notice as the eyes below are pinned downwards to the screens. It hangs above and watches.

  MAN OF THE CLOTH

  One figure stays isolate, positioned on the highest ridge. A band of white encircles this figure’s throat and mostly he kneels with his head covered, on the hard rock, unmoving, his hands gripping the earth. The fires do not draw him, nor the waters, nor the groups gathered around the cooking-pits; the DJ does not draw him either. There are times when this hooded figure must leave the ridge and enter the conifers to squat over the stinking trench and then stand and move deeper into the trees to lean for support
against a trunk with his face in his hands and at such times he is observed – the smaller shapes in the firs and the sitka spruce and in the pockets of bracken just as hunched as him. Quick trips, these, that he makes before he re-sites himself on the ridge again. At night he curls up in a sheep-scrape to sleep but is back on the rocky ridge at dawn, his face covered but turned to the sun returned, before the other faces appear bleared and agog from under canvas or lean-to or even holes hacked and mattocked into the up-sloping earth. In this place where it seems everything has relearned how to talk to everything else this figure endures aloof and hooded, unassessed by the eye that flies with its capacity to turn all the other faces that move around this mostly fixed point one blinding white, all without feature.

  God it is a thudding sun that has turned the two carriages of the train into one long hot-box. Adam feels the heat from its steel sides rippling out and it feels to him as if there is too much sky above him; there is a giddiness within him as if he might fall suddenly upwards, into the scorching blue. An hour earlier he’d woken with a jolt on the couch back at his flat, baggy of face and hag-rid, feeling like someone from Tregaron, all drool and pustules, and in the bath his battered guts released bad and shocking gases the stench of which has stayed on his skin in some kind of hellish homeopathy. Couldn’t remember getting back to his flat and there are scrapes and bruises on him, on his face and elbows. A thumbnail grouted about with black blood. He’d stacked all the post on top of the fridge unopened and there it will remain. Nothing of any meaning or value to him in those envelopes. Not to the chambers of his lungs. Quilty hadn’t been there and this had pained Adam but there had been signs of his uncontrollable passage; a mangled rat’s tail beneath the TV. Might well have been Adam’s final sleep in that flat; surely some of those envelopes contained eviction. He can envisage his furniture in the windows of Craft on the other platform there, over the tracks.